St. Aloysius School of Pottstown celebrating 100 years Catholic education

POTTSTOWN — Based on the weather report in The Daily Pottstown Ledger, Sunday, Sept. 22, 1912, was one of those early fall days when the air is still warm and the sky is clear blue with a few traces of white clouds. After the heat and humidity of the early part of the month, it was a perfect day to be out of doors and thus a perfect time for members of St. Aloysius Roman Catholic Church to gather for the ground-breaking ceremony that would mark the beginning of construction of the congregation’s first parochial school.

About 300 adults and 250 children of the Sunday school were led by the Rev. William A. Wachter, the church’s pastor, and the Rev. Martin Dondalek, pastor of Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church, as they filed out of St. Aloysius that afternoon and processed to the school site on the church’s north side.

There, while the people sang “Jesus Savior of My Soul,” the priests asked God’s blessing on the children, on the ground and on the work and workmen.

After a sermon by Wachter, the group re-entered the church for the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.

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Then all returned to the school site and the ceremonial ground breaking took place. As was expected, Wachter and Dondalek took up shovels and broke the first ground. That is where ceremonies of this type normally end. But this one was different. Every man, woman and child there was “given the opportunity to also remove a shovel full of dirt,” The Ledger reported.

The newspaper’s account didn’t mention how many people participated, but if only half of those present decided to take a turn it would have been a long time before the digging was finished.

Though that Sunday marked the beginning of the physical building of the school, there was good deal of financial and spiritual preparation that went before.

After Wachter’s arrival as pastor of St. Aloysius on May 21, 1909, he immediately began to train his parishioners in the importance of Catholic education. In a little less than three years, he felt the congregation was ready for the undertaking, and in February of 1912 he announced a school would be built the following year.

The school was sufficiently completed in time for the opening of the 1913 school year. It contained four large and two small classrooms on the first floor and on the second floor, four small classrooms, two at each end. In the middle was a 500-seat auditorium that was completed in April 1914 by Joseph Ginther, school custodian, and Harry Hartenstine, a master stonemason.

Wachter chose nuns from the Franciscan Sisters of current-day Aston to teach the children. Accompanied by the Rev. Mother General, Sister Aloysia, and the Inspectress of Schools, Sister Eberharda, the sisters arrived in Pottstown on Aug. 28, 1913, just five days before school began, only to discover that renovations to the convent at 215 Beech St. were not complete. Thus, they spent their first month in Pottstown ensconced in the rectory, while Wachter took up quarters elsewhere.

The sisters who comprised the first St. Aloysius faculty were Sister Mary Digna, Superior; Sister Pasquilina, Assistant, and Sisters Benno, Ennatha, Ceciliana and Consilia.

The school opened on Sept. 2, 1913, with 178 pupils; six days later the total enrollment stood at 189 in first through eighth grades. The curriculum was standard language arts, mathematics, history, geography, music, art, penmanship, and, of course, religion and catechism.

The building was dedicated on Sunday, Oct. 5. Archbishop Edmond Prendergast of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, assisted by visiting priests, led the ceremony, and for the occasion the children sang “God Bless Our School,” a song composed by one of the sisters. Following the dedication, the archbishop confirmed a class of 20 adults.

At the school’s closing exercise on June 22, 1914, the following pupils comprised the school’s first graduating class: Paul Keene, Bernadette Flannery, Valeria Normandin, Lillian Sides and Alice Short. All these students distinguished themselves and their school by passing the public high school entrance examination.

In 1919, the commercial school, a two-year course of instruction designed to prepare high school students for careers as bookkeepers and secretaries, became part of the St. Aloysius educational program. The first class, which graduated in 1921, had 11 students: Anne Elizabeth Clarey, Madeline Clare Finn, Marion Finn, Elizabeth Anne Sweeney, Helen Wheeler, John Tobin, Nicholas Szymanski, Adolphe Wilke and J. Carroll Keene.

The commercial school continued for 19 years before closing its doors. The quality of the education the students received enabled them to secure good jobs in an era when most Americans did not go on to college.

Mary Hennessey McCarthy noted that because of her commercial school training she was able to land a job as a bookkeeper at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Reading. For some time she commuted to work by train, with indifferent results. “I’d fall asleep” she recalled, and “the fellows (on the train) would put flowers in my hands so I’d look like I was dead.” When her sister, Elizabeth, also got a job at St. Joseph’s, their father bought them a Chevy and they drove to work.

The older generation tells some wonderful stories about their days at St. Aloysius in a time that was very different from today.

There were no school buses. Every family had to find a way to get their children to school. Some, like the Flannerys, who lived in Berks County, obviously took the train to Pottstown, but for most, getting to school required a long trudge in all kinds of weather.

Jane Kelly Hospador remembers walking to school from the 800 block of South Street. “My brother Hugh and I walked together. I was 8 years old and he was 6. He held my hand as we walked along High Street,” she said.

Mary Hennessey McCarthy painted a picture of the Hennessey children making the trek to school when the streets and sidewalks were covered with snow. Her big brother John would blaze the trail and the rest followed in single file in his tracks as their procession moved north on Grant Street to Beech and then made the long haul west to St. Aloysius.

The late Elizabeth Freese, longtime St. Aloysius School librarian, once recalled that in her student days there was no school nurse and that “once or twice a year students were taken to the feed mill across Hanover Street to be weighed on the feed scale.

Though the school playground was only a 40-foot wide strip of dirt, students still had a good time at recess. Tom Ludwig, who attended St. Aloysius in the late 1920s and early ’30s, remembers Sister Carnella who “beat us shooting marbles, could drive a baseball across Third Street” and then “jump double-Dutch with the girls.”

From the time of its construction until the 1950s, the school changed very little, but Freese wrote, “Its enrollment grew by leaps and bounds.” The large number of students enrolled strained the school’s resources to the maximum.

Mary Ellen Krantz Lees remembers that her first-grade class in 1948 had 98 students and “boards were stretched across the aisles to make additional desks.” Lees also mentioned that this multitude was taught by Sister Marie Andrew who was at the time “only 19 years old” and “didn’t have an aide.”

Obviously, the 40-year-old school desperately needed to expand. Monsignor William M. Begley was the pastor who led the congregation through this period of growth.

Under Begley’s direction, the school’s basement was converted into a cafeteria, the halls and the classrooms were upgraded and four additional classrooms were created by dividing the school auditorium.

After the completion of St. Pius X High School, Begley continued to improve the facilities of St. Aloysius, constructing a new school building and convent. The formal dedication of both took place on May 5, 1962. Presiding at the ceremony was Archbishop John J. Krol, who celebrated the first Pontifical High Mass held in St. Aloysius Church.

The next addition to St. Aloysius came in mid-1970 when the pastor, Monsignor Michael Bednar, arranged for the purchase of the property at the northwest corner of Beech and Penn streets, which in 1973 was the site of Youse’s Auto Parts.

Two years of renovation and expansion transformed the building into a modern multi-use facility that has served as the school’s kitchen and cafeteria, a gymnasium for physical education classes, a place for committee meetings, and a social hall. Named Begley Hall in honor of the monsignor, the structure’s formal dedication was held on Nov. 2, 1975.

Thanks to the construction of the parish’s Gathering Center, the school now provides preschool classes for 3- and 4-year-old children and CARES, an extended day care program for the children of working parents.

Over the years, the makeup of the faculty has been completely transformed. The first St. Aloysius teachers were all nuns. The first lay teacher joined the faculty in the 1950s. Since the departure of Sister Wanda Marie Schlager and Sister Agnes in 2008, the faculty is made up entirely of lay teachers headed by Principal Jack Schulte, who arrived at the school in 2010.

St. Aloysius School is continually striving to improve the quality of its education. In the 1980s, the school, after submitting to a rigorous examination by a team of educators, received its first Middle States Accreditation.

St. Aloysius’ students also score well in competition with their peers from other Catholic schools. The Neumann Scholarship, endowed by the Connelly Foundation in 1995, annually awards high school tuition grants to eighth-grade students who score highest in a standardized test. To date, 12 St. Aloysius students have won these scholarships, with two, Robert Cocci and Christina Kuklinski, placing highest in Montgomery County.

St. Aloysius has been around for 100 years. Over that time, some things have changed. Lay teachers take care of the instruction, the students wear uniforms, and few walk to school.

However, the school’s rigorous academic program buttressed by religious training has remained the same and has been the lodestone for thousands of students.

Mary Giangiacomo Finn, a 1939 graduate of the school, stated, “St. Aloysius has helped to mold my character and give me the strong faith that I have.”